The nullity at the center or beginning of the Fibonacci sequence does not disappear or die when it’s succession ensues. It’s an infinite egress and an infinite evolution of nullity remains, however interesting, a nullity.
Been reading William Poteat’s essay “Myths, Stories, History, Eschatology and Action: Some Polanyian Meditations” in Intellect and Hope, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1968. I have, of course, written about Poteat before. Some thoughts:
First, there is a steep learning curve associated with this which I humbly admit beyond my capacity. Still, I strive.
The first thing that struck me is:
The realm of myth can be thought of as prehuman silence. I construe this, probably wrongly, as Polany’s tacit dimension. He’s trying to get at the relationship of man to his spoken words. This is, I want to think, in relation to the belief that “God” spoke the world into being. “Let there be light!” And before that it’s said in the beginning was the word and more so that the word was God. This aligns with the thought instilled by my mentor G.V. Desani that the Universe is a throbbing as I suppose is the meaning of “in the beginning was the word.” So, God can be thought of as vibration, a throbbing, as Desani puts it, based on the instructions, teachings of his benefactors in the Indian subcontinent.
Light is a gift; so it is. And further, aside from physical light we are given the light of truth, the light of understanding, the light of beauty, the light of love, and the light of wisdom; the light of hope. I take these to be facets of physical light serving to enhance, make more attractive, supplement, increase the brilliance. So, we are drawn to light.
When I was a mere boy I once had a vision, a meditation, a waking dream, as it were, that my perception of the world was receding into darkness, away from the light of this world. The planets disappeared into the sun and likewise the sun into the milky way which in turn lost itself in the local group of galaxies. The light of these kept resolving and getting smaller as I receded, as their distance from my standpoint grew greater and greater until finally all of creation was a mere speck of light surrounded by infinite darkness. Hello void! I knew the whole of creation was that minuscule speck of light and that the void was a mere finger pointing at the illumination of the focal point. I felt very insignificant, a mere nothing of nothing. Yet that light was mine; somehow we were bound in what Poteat calls “prehuman silence.”
The gift of light is also the gift of life. But, one might wonder, does light or life, have an inherent claim on eternity? If so, how does that relate to death and darkness? Do they have equal claims? Are they mere phases of eternal process? Perhaps only process itself has an inherent claim on eternity. The nullity at the center or beginning of the Fibonacci sequence does not disappear or die when it’s succession ensues. Actually, it’s there in all the subsequent ramifications, each iteration consisting of the first and each subsequent instance, though slightly altered, a lot like a fractal. Every instance manifests it’s precedents but with enough alteration to keep interest (hope?) alive. Thus, Greek civilization is not dead but lives on in the racial memory of human beings.***
Poteat writes (page 215), “What has been concerning me in all this is the curious relation of man to words; how through some poignant mystery we have occasionally the courage just to say something; and yet how even then – indeed especially then – it comes to us – this courage – unbidden, as a gift, but a gift which paradoxically, it may seem, if faithfully received, puts us into bondage: as if giving ourselves out of our prehuman silence into the realm of speech and saying is an act first of hope, then of love and thanksgiving for the world, but also an act by which everything becomes forever ambiguous and equivocal.”
My note on this at hand says he defines here the conundrum of creation, how God must feel about his creation. This is a guide post. Perhaps everything being equivocal and ambiguous is a measure of our freedom, and is really the nature of the substratum written of in the Mandukya Upanishad. Everything is process, fluid, nuanced; it is hope.
It may be as according to Buddhism that nothing abides, there is no abiding soul, that all is process. But does this deny the existence of a substratum? Perhaps it asserts that the process and the substratum are the same. Yet we are naturally inclined to hold that change implies the unchanging or, that by which change is possible or intelligible in the sense that cold is that by which hot is knowable.
One might claim, or want to, that there is ultimate reality and that there is contingent reality. But this might be false, a mere assumption based on the qualities of being a person, a manifested live, conscious, entity. It’s said Samsara is Nirvana meaning that relative existence properly understood, seen from the standpoint of ultimate reality is itself that ultimate. The world of coming and going, of manifestation, is when properly understood unchanging, timeless, extra spatial, an illusion – as in that speck of light I saw as a boy not seeming to allow for multiplicity, for a world of things moving in relation to one another. Is there an actual truth to this? I don’t, and probably can’t know; and maybe can’t understand either.
I think that consciously or not when I use the first person singular I am invoking the whole universe. Further, that I is not me as a contingent entity but is the entire tacit dimension as person; that my invocation brings the world into being as that particular “I” the naming of which is likewise a gift, a gift of ownership. I take possession of the world when I use the first personal pronoun, at least nominally. Also, if one reads the Mandukya Upanishad of Guadapada with Sankara’s commentary and substitutes tacit dimension for ultimate reality, is the same meaning there? So perhaps Polanyi and Poteat, for instance, were thinking in the same vein as those ancients.
The same with breathing. Watching one’s breath meditatively as in Vipassana meditation one comes to the realization that I am not the breather; I am, if anything, the observer of breathing. Breathing is ongoing but no one breaths; there is no one there except in name only. To say I breath is to indulge an illusion; to say I am, to say I do so and so is likewise illusory. There is breathing, no doubt, but the breather is beyond any boundaries whatsoever, for the tacit dimension, I want to claim, is boundless, unknowable, unsearchable, infinite; it is the entire cosmos itself. The process is real but there is no person in the common sense of a unique individual there. The so called breather is only nominally real. When I invoke the first person singular what I actually do is claim existence in name only. Thus “I am that I am” is senseless. But isn’t that senselessness a goad to true understanding? It provokes a leap of faith into the unknown, the void. As Ernst Cassirer might put it, the word takes us to transcendence of the word.
Language – another insight gleaned from Cassirer* – casts a dark shadow on thought and can never become entirely commensurate therewith. Thus the world is illusionary and mythological when the “self deception of the mind is realized,” discovered. “All symbolism … is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal.” I think language is not different from nature itself whose forms fruitlessly strive to express the ultimate reality. This striving is infinitely varied and involves existential hope. It might reveal God but simultaneously casts a shadow thereon. Knowledge likewise. All to often we take our name of a thing – and names only apply to things – as the thing itself in its true ultimate nature. The ultimate reality is, however, revealed when one comes to an understanding of this. Submitted: The greater the belief in the validity of the language as knowledge, the darker the shadow, the denser the obfuscation. Thus, science tends to hide what it seeks to reveal because we “trust” our measurements. Religion, likewise, because we trust our faith. The world of sensory input is transferred into the world of ideas, meaning, and purpose through the naming process. Notice first, then name, then denote, that is, then know and understand.
If the ultimate reality is unknowable, unsearchable, unfathomable then the meaning and purpose of anything at all is likewise a mystery. Therefore the meaning and purpose of a life is what a person makes it. Put another way. If you can’t measure the whole then the parts are likewise immeasurable, truly. If you can’t know “God” you know nothing. That’s a positive statement. The infinity of the whole applies to every part. Infinity is without meaning, being immeasurable. Defining a part assumes that which contains the part is definable.
Not knowing the ultimate, you know nothing. There is your freedom! If you want meaning and purpose make it yourself. It’s an individual responsibility; the freedom to do so is the ultimate gift. And most importantly, it gives you the profound responsibility of being co-creator of the universe; a kind of opportunity tending towards hypostatic union.
An essay “In Pursuit of Discovery” by another University of Texas professor I was privileged to know, Donald Weismann. is included in “Intellect and Hope” – there are several others, too. In his essay Weismann quotes Bernard Bosanquet that “In creative art the production is as it were a form of perception; it is subordinate to the full imagining, the complete looking or hearing.”** Now, I leave it to others to judge whether this piece of mine is “art”, however, I reiterate it is a striving. Perhaps as such it will help me, and maybe others, to come to some understanding that will serve to enrich one’s life or at least assist in coming closer to a full imagining.
*Ernst Cassirer, “Language and Myth”, translated by Susanne K Langer, Dover Publications Inc, New York, 1953
**Bernard Bosanquet, “Three Lectures on Aesthetics” London: Macmillan, 1923, P. 34
***Will and Ariel Durant, “The Lessons of History”, Simon and Schuster, 1968, page 93